How cloud hosting trumps traditional shared hosting each and every time

Once upon a time, cloud hosting technology was reserved for large companies and corporations. Only they could afford to put together complex cloud environments.

With the evolution of technology, those days are over. Cloud hosting is now affordable and available to companies large and small. Countless businesses are making the switch into the cloud, and for good reason.

Uptime that can’t be beat

One major difference between cloud hosting and shared hosting is the ability of cloud environments to offer 100% uptime. Regular shared hosting can only offer 99% uptime, at best.

How is this possible? Well, with cloud hosting your website is on hundreds of servers. If one of them happens to go down, another server will step in automatically. A server is always at the ready.

In contrast, shared hosting puts your website on one server. If it crashes, so does your site. There are no automatic backups in place to deal with potential problems or traffic surges.

Full scalability

In shared hosting, it’s common for another customer’s major traffic spike to affect the performance of your site.

With the cloud, this is not an issue. Big increases in web activity are dealt with dynamically and seamlessly. The cloud takes everything in stride. If more power is needed, the cloud automatically delivers, and then gears down when the rush is over. Read more

Using CDN To Improve Your End User Experience

If you take the time to notice the actual content being delivered to your browser when you load a page on any large site, you’ll find that many of the images – and even the text content itself in some cases – are not actually being retrieved from the site you thought you were hitting. For example, I just loaded the CNN.com home page at the time of this writing and I can see a photo of the Washington, D.C. subway. If I view the source on that photo, I can see it is actually being loaded from a content delivery network, or CDN: Read more

Managing Risk – Your Backup Strategy

We’ve all been there. You think to yourself that you should back up a file, directory, or database then after making some really critical changes… do a quick file copy and – BAM! – all your work is lost. Less frequently on desktop machines – but surprisingly often on heavily used servers – a disk failure can result in even more catastrophic losses. If you consider that many sites online comprise the intellectual property, storefront, and contents of a business, a disk drive failure could at a minimum mean downtime for the business. In a worst-case scenario with a complete failure where all contents were lost, a business could be shut down immediately due to a loss of data, configuration, and/or the complete site software and configuration. All of this may be stating the obvious to most but, believe me, total data loss does happen to many sites that weren’t equipped with a proper backup strategy. Read more

Beefing Up Security With Web Application Firewalls

If you’re fortunate enough to have a growing online business, you will find your hosting needs growing along with it.  What may have started as a single server may now begin to resemble a burgeoning IT shop, with multiple web servers, database servers, mail servers, and file servers.   All businesses reach a threshold where security and reliability of the environment becomes paramount – to the point where it becomes a higher priority to protect the assets and infrastructure before investing any further in functionality and business growth.  One of the first appliances deployed to protect that infrastructure is a firewall, which can be defined as a hardware and/or software appliance whose primary purpose is to protect network resources by limiting or eliminating unauthorized access to those resources.  While larger businesses often opt to invest in hardware firewalls capable of on-the-fly packet filtering, encryption of all incoming and outgoing requests, and processing of extremely large numbers of concurrent connections, small-to-mid-sized businesses are often best served by software firewalls and specifically Web Application Firewalls, or WAFs. Read more

How To Move Your Shared Host To A Dedicated Server

Shared hosting is the choice of many small business websites as well as a preferred option for many bloggers and individuals maintaining low-to-moderately trafficked personal web sites.  Shared hosting has a number of advantages, but obviously first and foremost among these for most small businesses is cost.  Unfortunately, shared hosting has a number of disadvantages, particularly for sites experiencing large fluctuations in traffic, performance issues, or for those sites that really require lower-level access to the underlying operating system and/or server hardware.  On a shared host, your site can be affected by one of the other dozens – or even hundreds – of sites and web applications that may be running on the same physical hardware.

The best hosting providers will offer support and a documented migration plan for moving sites and server configuration from your shared or virtualized environment to a dedicated server.  For hosts that offer control panel packages – such as cPanel – migration tools allow you to move configuration options between servers, which can greatly improve the time it takes to migrate between server installations, as well as improve the overall results of the migration process.  cPanel allows site administrators to configure a plethora of common operating system, memory, storage, and application options, including:

• Basic and advanced email configuration, including account management, spam blocking, authentication, and mailing lists
• Search engine optimization (SEO) tools, optimized for search engines such as Google
• File management utilities, such as disk space usage, FTP administration, and backups
• Application management, including handy configuration tools for managing popular apps such as Apache and MySQL
• Server security configuration, including SSH, SSL, and IP Deny management

If a tool such as cPanel is used to migrate configuration options, the overall migration process becomes much easier.  In addition to that, the “standard” steps required to migrate between hosts require application software in use to be installed and individually configured and, of course, DNS settings will need to be updated so your server can be found at its new IP address.  As mentioned earlier, the best web hosts will support every step of this process and answer questions (and even solve problems) as you move forward in this process.   It is always important to complete testing of the new environment before DNS records are updated, which will allow you time to test and resolve any issues before the public hits your new host.

A recommended Approved Host Dedicated Server provider is DedicatedNOW.com.  For more information on DedicatedNOW and the FindMyHost consumer guarantee included with your purchase, please visit: www.findmyhost.com/dedicatednow.

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